Babak Zand Goodarzi & Dom Dowbekin, The Story of Looking in 360, 2017
360° video with soundtrack
Directed by Babak Zand Goodarzi & Dom Dowbekin
Editor: Raika Khosravi
Music: Jasmin Kent Rodgman
Thanks to Mark Cousins, Jill Moreton, Jamie Byng, Vicki Watson, Oli Weatherly & Victoria Al-Din
Stateless proposed immersive 360° video as the perfect medium to embellish Mark Cousins’s exquisite exploration into visual culture, The Story of Looking. His publishers Canongate agreed, so we joined Mark on the road for a few adventures to create this short piece for VR. It’s designed to augment the reader experience and give a glimpse of the world through the writer’s eyes.
About the book:
In The Story of Looking, Mark Cousins takes us on a lightning-bright tour – in words and images – through how our looking selves develop over the course of a lifetime, and the ways that looking has changed over the centuries. From great works of art to holiday photos, from cityscapes to cinema, through science and history, protest and propaganda, and the refusal to look, this book illuminates how we construct as well as receive the things we see.
“A wide-ranging history of looking … you will gaze at it in wonder”
Guardian
“A history of the human gaze … Illuminating … Roams freely across history, art, film, photography, science and technology … Indispensable as a reference book”
Observer
“Bloody genius”
Christopher Doyle
“Intriguing and beautiful … [A] gloriously haphazard intellectual scrapbook … Wide-ranging, deep-seeing and clever”
Scotland On Sunday
“An attempt to catalogue how and why we look, what we look at and how our social and cultural surroundings shape what we see … the result is, by turns, learned, often surprising … Fascinating”
Glasgow Sunday Herald, Arts Books Of The Year
Review in the Guardian
Available to buy at Canongate
About Mark Cousins:
Mark Cousins is a Northern Irish author and filmmaker. His books include Widescreen: Watching. Real. People. Elsewhere and The Story of Film. His films – including I am Belfast, The First Movie, Atomic and The Story of Film: An Odyssey – have won a Peabody Award, the Prix Italia and the Stanley Kubrick Award, and have been shown in MoMA in New York, at the Cannes Film Festival and around the world. He is Honorary Professor of Film at the University of Glasgow. He lives in Edinburgh.
@markcousinsfilm